Airpocalypse: Get Smart on Smog
Contributed by Philip Nelson
If there is one word that has been impossible to escape in China over the past couple of weeks, it is this one: 雾霾. Pronounced “woo my” in Chinese, it means “smog”, and in the last few years it has become the nemesis of hundreds of millions of people across China.
As I write, the view from the windows of my office is post-apocalyptic. It’s as if the office is floating in a murky, malevolent sea of brown. I can just about make out the faint outline of a building or two across the street but not much else.
Beijing is currently suffering from the second of its two worst bouts of pollution this year. The first was last week, when Beijingers woke up to find their city enveloped in air so thick you could almost chew on it. People in the north of China like to think of themselves as a hardy bunch but the smog that shrouded much of northeast China then was enough to cow the most courageous of spirits. In toxic conditions like these, the real menace is PM2.5, another indispensable term that is ubiquitous in Beijing at the moment. Standing for “particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter”, PM2.5 is what makes smog hazardous, as it penetrates deep into the lungs and can cause heart disease, lung cancer and chronic respiratory problems. WHO recommends PM2.5 levels of no more than an average of 25 µg/m3 over a 24 hour period. Anything higher than this is bad for your health. The level in Beijing last week was over 900 µg/m3 and even reached 1,000 in some areas of the city. That’s 40 times the safe level.
The main culprits are coal and cars, but the reason why the smog’s been so serious recently is down to the season. The current wave is a result of the onset of winter, when the government finally permits the use of central heating and enormous quantities of coal are burned to generate warmth. Beijing had been particularly cold in the run up to November, increasing the demand for heating, and what made things even worse was the snow that fell a couple of weeks ago. Snow may make Beijing look magical for a while but it has the effect of aggravating the pollution; stagnant, humid air causes smog to linger over the city far longer than normal before being dispersed.
The Beijing authorities, however, for reasons best known to themselves, decided that pollution levels reaching 40 times the safe amount still didn’t merit a red alert in their emergency response plan for smog. Whether this was to save face or an ill-advised attempt not to slow the local economy, their decision was widely condemned by citizens on social media. The criticism they faced a week ago is probably what subsequently persuaded them to announce Beijing’s first ever code red response, when it became clear that we faced another three days of heavy pollution in a row this week. This is also perhaps a sign that they are taking the issue more seriously than before. As a result, factories and construction sites have been shut down, half of all cars have been taken off the road and schools have shut across Beijing, leaving a lot of working parents without access to childcare in a fix.
People expressed their anger at the smog in various ways, with many calling the authorities to account for having let the pollution get so bad; one wrote on Wechat “even our right to breathe has been taken away”. A Beijing performance artist, who goes by the rather appropriate name of “Brother Nut”, channeled his frustrations by strolling round the city sucking up smog in a vacuum cleaner and using the dust and dirt he collected to make a “smog brick”. Last year the Beijing Mayor, Wang Anshun, committed to cleaning up Beijing’s air by 2017, and pledged that if he failed then heads would roll, including his own. Comments like “I’m waiting for your head!” on social media indicate that some people are taking him quite literally by his word; he’s got one more year to get things under control before he’s in serious trouble…
In some ways China is a victim of its own success. Until the early 1980s, China’s GDP per capita was lower than India’s; by 2000 it was already twice that of India’s and the gap is still widening now. But it is paying a heavy price. The smog that plagues its metropoles today is a side effect of an almost Faustian pact to trade the quality of its environment for 30 years of unprecedented, lightening-speed development. China’s success in lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty has led to the construction of countless coal-fired power plants spewing out toxic emissions across the country and an explosion in private car ownership; Beijing is no longer a city of bicycles, it’s a city of traffic jams. The World Bank has reported that just 1 percent of China’s city dwellers (more than half the population) breathe safe air. China has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world, but air quality is the great equalizer — everyone breathes the same air, rich or poor.
It’s not just the air that has suffered. The head of China’s Ministry of Water Resources said in 2012 that up to 40% of China’s rivers are “seriously polluted” and an official report found that 200 million rural Chinese don’t have access to clean drinking water. The government has also admitted that groundwater in 90% of China’s cities is contaminated. In 2014 it released a report showing that almost 20% of China’s arable land is polluted by heavy metals, raising serious implications for food security. Originally the results of this 2005 report were kept a state secret because so they were so bad, but the fact that they have now been published might be a sign of growing transparency.
China is not alone in choking on its own development. With 13 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, India is facing even more severe environmental problems than China. Its capital, New Delhi, has the worst air pollution on earth. The sources of its smog are similar to China’s (i.e. vehicle emissions and fuel) but other factors, such as burning stubble in fields after the harvest, also have an impact. WHO has estimated that indoor pollution, caused by paraffin stoves and burning wood, coal and cow dung, may kill more than one million Indians a year. While the Indian government has insisted that environmental restrictions should not be allowed to impede growth, Yvo de Boer, a former UN chief negotiator on climate change, has warned India to avoid China’s fate, suggesting that air pollution costs China the equivalent of a tenth or more of GDP annually.
It’s clear, not least to the Chinese government, that China’s current development model is unsustainable. This is why the government’s next five-year plan for economic and social development between 2016 and 2020 focuses on shifting towards a cleaner, greener model which will “maintain medium-high growth” while rebalancing the economy away from heavy industry and towards services and domestic consumption. China is the first developing country to commit to a reduction in CO2 emissions. There have even been hints of limits on coal consumption and a possible ban on building new coal-fired power plants. It’s hoped that this new sustainable model of development, to create a “moderately prosperous” society, will allow the economy to continue growing, while energy use and greenhouse gas emissions stay stable. Although coal produces around 70 percent of China’s energy, it has been suggested that China may already have reached a peak in its coal consumption, something it had committed to do by 2020. Even more excitingly, while China had pledged to reach a peak in admissions by 2030, some are predicting that the country may reach this goal several years ahead of schedule. There may even be evidence that global CO2 emissions are set to fall slightly this year as a result of China’s efforts with a drop of 200 million metric tons (220 million tons). Although this amount is tiny (0.6 percent), if it’s correct it will be the first time that emissions have reduced while the world economy was still growing.
The only way that China is going to be able to move forward with its new cleaner agenda, however, is through investment in green energy — and that’s exactly what it’s doing. Since 2012, China has been the world’s biggest investor in renewable energy, working to improve green energy infrastructure and investing heavily in R&D to make low-carbon technology more affordable and available. In 2014 China spent more than $80 billion on new renewables generating capacity. It has also grown into the world’s largest wind-power market and its solar power sector is expanding rapidly.
There’s a strange contrast between all this apparently good news and the dystopian view from the office window. It’s all very well talking about statistics and targets in the abstract, but for Beijingers who have no choice but to put up with the smog on a daily basis the effects of pollution are all too tangible. Perhaps if COP21 were being held in Beijing (or New Delhi) right now rather than Paris, world leaders would be more willing to work together quickly to find an effective solution — if nothing else so they could escape the smog at the earliest possible opportunity.
